Abstract

Introduction: Now a day, the prevalence of Non-Communicable Diseases is increasing dramatically posing a double burden to countries of low socioeconomic status.  It is estimated that HTN affects about 1 billion people globally. Recent studies have indicated that high blood pressure is becoming an issue for children and adolescents, although it has historically been considered a disease of adults. Implementing an effective school based educational intervention to improve knowledge and prevention of risk factors towards hypertension becomes essential. Hence, the present study aimed in evaluating the effectiveness of a school based hypertension prevention education among high school students.

Method: The study was done among high school students at public high schools found in Bahir Dar City Administration using a one group pre-post study design, 2019. Formal procedures were followed to enroll study participants to the current study. Pre-post interventions data on knowledge of high blood pressure and its risk factors was entered into the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 25. Descriptive statistics were used to describe demographic characteristics. Paired sample t- tests was conducted to evaluate the significance of the intervention. Confidence interval was set at 95% and all analyses were two-tailed.

Result: Seventy five high school students from three high schools were enrolled. The mean age of the study participants was 16.8 with minimum and maximum age of 15 and 20 years old respectively. The study revealed that there was a significant difference in the mean score of high school students on their knowledge towards hypertension after they received the training. A paired-samples t-test revealed that there was a statistically significant increase in knowledge scores from Time 1 (M= 52.75, SD= 18.8) to Time 2 (M= 71.37, SD = 18.3), t (74) = -10.6, p<. 0001 (two-tailed). The mean increase in hypertension knowledge scores was 18.62 with a 95% confidence interval.

Conclusion: Results of this study showed that the educational intervention led to an increase in the students’ levels of knowledge about hypertension. Schools in collaboration with health care institutions shall provide awareness creation and behavioral skill training for high school students to practice healthy behaviors to tackle chronic non-communicable diseases.